The next step is represented by two-year-old children. In all human societies, two-year-olds move spontaneously from one-word utterances to strings of two words, and then more. But these utterances are still just word strings with little grammar, and the words are nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two-year-olds’ word strings are like the first stages of pidgins, or like the strings of words made by captive apes who have learned how to use symbols.
From pidgins to creoles, or from the word strings of two-year-olds to the complete sentences of four-year-olds, is a giant step. This step adds elements of grammar, such as prefixes, suffixes, and word order. It adds words that do not refer to things in the real world but that, instead, have grammatical functions, such as and, or, before, and if In this stage, words are arranged into phrases and sentences. Perhaps this giant step is what triggered the Great Leap Forward.
Animal and human communication once seemed to be separated by an unbridgeable gulf. Now we have identified parts of bridges starting from the opposite shores, and some stepping- stones spaced across the gulf. We are beginning to understand how language, the most unique and important human characteristic, arose from our origins in the animal world.
Congo the chimpanzee finishes a painting. Although he and other animals have produced artwork that has impressed—and sometimes fooled—art critics, these animal artists lived in captivity. Wild chimpanzees have not yet been seen making art, although their closest relatives take great pride in their artistic creations.
CHAPTER 7
ANIMAL ORIGINS OF ART
SIRI S DRAWINGS WON PRAISE AS SOON AS other artists saw them. Willem de Kooning, a famous painter, said, “They had a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality.” Jerome Witkin, an art expert and professor, said, “This drawing indicates a grasp of the essential mark that makes the emotion.”
Who was Siri, this remarkable new artist? Witkin guessed from her drawings that she was female and interested in Asian decorative lettering. What he did not know was that she was eight feet tall and weighed four tons. Siri was an Asian elephant who drew by holding a pencil in her trunk.
Actually, Siri wasn’t extraordinary by elephant standards. Wild elephants often use their trunks to make drawing motions in the dust. Captive elephants often scratch marks on the ground using a stick or stone. A captive elephant named Carol made paintings that sold for hundreds of dollars and ended up on the walls of many doctors’ and lawyers’ offices.
Supposedly, art is the noblest unique human trait. It sets us apart from animals at least as much as language does. Language, however, serves a useful purpose, but art has no obvious function. Its origins are considered a sublime mystery.
There are huge differences between Siri’s art and the work of human artists. {For one thing, Siri wasn’t trying to communicate her message to other elephants.) Still, it’s a similar physical activity that creates products that even experts can’t tell from human artistic productions. And the artlike activities of animals such as elephants may help us understand how human art originally functioned.
What Is Art?
If we’re going to claim that true art is unique to humans, what makes it different from animal productions that may seem similar? How is our music different from birdsong? People have made three claims about how human art is different from anything animals do.
First, art has no utilitarian purpose—in other words, it is not useful. To a biologist, “useful” means that it helps us to survive or to pass on our genes to offspring. The claim is that human art does not fulfill those functions. Birdsong, in contrast, helps birds attract mates and defend territory, and this in turn lets them pass their genes to the next generation.
Second, art is just for aesthetic pleasure, or the appreciation of beauty. A dictionary defines art as “the making or doing of things that have form or beauty.” While we can’t ask mockingbirds or nightingales if they enjoy the form and beauty of their songs, it’s significant that they sing mainly during the breeding season. This strongly suggests that they’re singing not for aesthetic pleasure but to court their mates and defend their nesting territories.
Third, art is taught and learned, not something passed down to us in our genes. Each human group has its own distinctive art style. Knowledge of how to make and enjoy that style is learned, not inherited. For example, it’s easy to tell apart traditional songs sung in Tokyo and Paris. But those differences aren’t hardwired into our genes. French and Japanese people can learn each other’s songs. Many species of birds, in contrast, inherit the knowledge of how to make and respond to the particular song of their species. Each of those birds would produce the right song even if it never heard it, or heard only the songs of other species.
Keeping these claims about human art in mind, let’s now examine some more examples of animal art.
Ape Artists
Human art may seem far removed from Siri’s drawings and Carol’s paintings. After all, elephants aren’t even closely related to us in evolutionary terms. What about art produced by our primate relatives?
Captive chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and even monkeys have produced art, either by painting with a finger or a brush, or by using pencil, chalk, or crayons. A chimp named Congo did up to thirty-three paintings in one day. He must have done them for his own satisfaction, because he did not show his work to other chimps and threw a tantrum when his brush was taken away. Congo and another chimp, Betsy, were honored by a show of their work in London in 1957, and Congo had another show the following year.
Almost all the paintings at those chimp shows were sold (to human buyers). Plenty of human artists can’t make that boast. Still other ape paintings were sneaked into exhibits of work made by human artists. Art critics, with no idea that certain paintings had been made by apes, enthusiastically praised those works.
Child psychologists were given paintings made by chimpanzees at the Baltimore Zoo and asked to diagnose the painters’ mental problems—without being told that the painters were chimps. The psychologists guessed that a painting by a three-year-old male chimp had been made by an aggressive seven- or eight-year-old boy. They also guessed that two paintings by a one-year-old female chimp were by two different, but disturbed, ten-year-old girls. The psychologists got the gender of each artist right. They were only wrong about the species.
These paintings by our closest relatives start to blur the line between human art and animal activities. Like human paintings, the ape paintings served no clear purpose. They were produced just for satisfaction. There is, though, a problem with claiming a parallel between ape art and human art. Ape painting is just an unnatural activity of captive animals. It does not occur in the wild.
You could argue that because ape painting is not a natural behavior, it cannot shed light on the possible animal origins of art. So let’s turn now to a natural behavior, the activity of bowerbirds. These birds create bowers, the most elaborate structures built and decorated by any animal species other than humans.
THE OLDEST ART
WE HUMANS MANAGED TO DO WITHOUT ART for the first 6,960,000 years of the 7 million or so years since we separated from chimps. Our earliest art forms may have been wood carving and body painting, but we wouldn’t know this today, because those art forms could not have been preserved in the fossil record. The first preserved hints of human art are some flower remains around Neanderthal skeletons (possible grave decorations), and some scratches on bones at Neanderthal campsites. We don’t know whether Neanderthals deliberately scattered those flowers or scratched those bones. They may be art, but they may simply be accidents.
Our first definite evidence for art comes from the Cro-Magnon people ofwestern Europe about sixty thousand years ago. Many examples survive, including statues, necklaces, and flutes and other musical instruments. Most famous are the many paintings— mostly of animals, some now extinct—that these humans left on cave walls in France and Spain.
Bowerbirds’ complex creations are beautiful, but bower building evol
ved and lasted because it serves a purpose. By building an excellent bower, a male bird shows females that he has the right stuff to be a good mate.
Beauty and the Bird
If I hadn’t already heard of bowers, I’d have thought the first one I saw was man-made, as nineteenth-century explorers did.
I had set out that morning from a New Guinea village of circular huts, neat rows of flowers, and people wearing decorative beads. Suddenly, in the jungle, I came across a beautifully woven circular hut eight feet around and four feet high, with a doorway large enough for a child to enter.
In front of the hut was a lawn of green moss, clean except for hundreds of natural objects that had obviously been placed there as decorations. These were mainly flowers, fruits, and leaves, with some fungi and butterfly wings. Objects of similar colors were grouped together—red fruits next to red leaves, for example. The largest decorations were a tall pile of black fungi facing the door and a pile of orange fungi a few yards away. All the blue objects had been placed inside the hut.
That hut was not a child’s playground. It had been built and decorated by a bird about the size of a jay—a bowerbird. These birds are found only in New Guinea and Australia. There are eighteen species, and in each species the male birds build bowers for one purpose: to seduce females. Building the bower is the male’s contribution to family life. Once he has mated with a female, she will build a nest and rear their young, while he tries to mate with as many other females as he can.
Females, often in groups, cruise around the bowers in their vicinity and inspect them all before choosing a mate. They select their mate by the quality of his bower, the number of its decorations, and how well it fits the local rules of bower building, which vary from place to place. Some populations of bowerbirds prefer blue decorations, others red or green or gray, while some build, in place of a hut, one or two towers, a two-walled avenue, or a four-walled box. There are populations that paint their bowers with crushed leaves or with oils from their bodies.
These local differences appear not to be hardwired into the birds’ genes. Instead, as young birds grow up, they watch older ones. In this way, male bowerbirds learn the locally correct way to decorate. Females learn the same rules, to help them pick their mates.
But what good does it do a female bowerbird to pick the guy who decorated his bower with the blue fruit?
Animals don’t have time to produce ten offspring with ten different mates to find out which mate produces the greatest number of surviving offspring. Instead, they use shortcuts. They rely on mating signals, such as songs, or ritual displays of markings or feathers—or bowers. Experts in animal behavior are hotly debating why those mating signals are a sign of good genes, or even ifthey are a sign of good genes.
Think, though, about what it means when a female bowerbird finds a male with a good bower. She knows he is strong, because his bower weighs hundreds of times his own weight and he had to drag some heavy decorations for dozens of yards. She knows he has the mechanical skill to weave hundreds of sticks into a hut, towers, or walls. He must have a good brain, to carry out this complex task. He must have good vision and memory, to search out the necessary decorations in the jungle. And he must be dominant over other males. Male bowerbirds spend much of their time trying to wreck or steal from one another’s bowers. Only the winners end up with undamaged, well-decorated bowers.
Bower building is a well-rounded test of a male bird’s genes. It’s as if women put each of their suitors through a weight-lifting contest, a sewing contest, a chess tournament, an eye test, and a boxing match before choosing the winner as her mate.
How did bowerbirds evolve to use art so cleverly for such important purposes? Most birds woo females by advertising their colorful bodies, their songs, or their offerings of food to hint at good genes. Male birds of paradise in New Guinea go further by clearing patches of forest floor to show off their fancy plumage. One bird of paradise species goes further still. Males decorate their cleared areas with items useful to a nesting female, such as pieces of snakeskin to line her nest, or fruit to eat. The bowerbirds have taken the next step.
In the course of bowerbird evolution, they learned that decorative objects don’t have to be useful. Even useless decorations can signal good genes if those decorations were difficult to get and keep.
Art Serves a Purpose
With bowerbirds in mind, let’s look again at those three claims that supposedly set human art apart from animal activities. They are: art is not useful, art is made for aesthetic pleasure alone, and art is learned, not inborn.
Both bower styles and our art styles are learned rather than inherited, which takes care of the third claim. As for aesthetic pleasure, no answer is possible. We can’t ask bowerbirds if they get pleasure out of making or looking at bowers. That leaves only the idea that true art has no use in the biological sense. That is definitely untrue of bower art, which has the sexual function of helping males get mates. Does human art also serve any biological functions? Does it help us to survive and pass on our genes?
Art—including dance, music, and poetry— often serves a seductive purpose, or is a beginning to romantic attachment or even sexual activity. This is a direct benefit, but art also brings indirect benefits to its owner. Art is a quick indicator of status, which in human and animal societies is a key to acquiring food, land, and mates. Art is often viewed as a sign of talent, money, or both. Some artists can also turn their art into food. Not only do successful individual artists make money by selling their art, but whole societies have supported themselves by making art for trade with other groups that produce food. The Siassi islanders, for example, lived off the coast of New Guinea on tiny islets with little room for gardens. They survived by carving beautiful bowls that other tribes paid for with food.
Art not only brings benefits to individuals but helps define human groups. People have always formed competing groups. Within each group, individuals depend on the help and protection of the other members of the group. That means that for a man or woman in a group to live long enough to marry, have children, and pass on his or her genes, the group must survive. A group is more likely to survive if it sticks together and remains unified. Cohesion, the group’s ability to stick together, depends on its distinctive culture, which includes language, religion, and art. In other words, art is one of the things that contribute to a group’s, and an individual’s, identity.
What about people who simply enjoy art, without using it to get money or mates? Isn’t private satisfaction a main reason for our art, just as it was for Siri the elephant and Congo the chimp? Of course. Art-making behavior may have started because it was useful, but animals that have leisure time—once they have brought their survival problems under control—can expand behaviors far beyond their original role.
If human art did evolve because it brought useful benefits to individuals and groups, it later came to serve other purposes. Those additional purposes include representing information (a possible explanation of the Cro-Magnon paintings of game animals), relieving boredom (a real problem for captive elephants and other animals), channeling nervous energy (a problem for us as well as them), and just providing pleasure. To say that art is useful doesn’t mean that it isn’t also pleasurable. In fact, if we weren’t programmed to enjoy art, it couldn’t serve its useful functions for us.
Perhaps we can now answer the question of why art as we know it is a trait of humans but not of any other animals. If chimps paint in captivity, why don’t they do so in the wild? As an answer, I suggest that wild chimps have their days filled with problems of finding food, surviving, and fending off rival chimp bands. If wild chimps had more leisure time, and the ability to make paints, they would be painting. The proof is that it has already happened: we’re still more than 98 percent chimp in our genes.
Famine and starvation stalked ireland in the 1840s, when a plant disease destroyed potato crops. Because people had become dependent on that single food source, as many as a mill
ion died.
CHAPTER 8
AGRICULTURE, FOR BETTER
AND WORSE
ONE OF OUR DEAREST BELIEFS USED TO BE THAT human history over the last million years was a long tale of progress, of things getting better and better. In particular, agriculture (farming crops and raising domestic animals) was believed to be our clearest step toward a better life. But recent discoveries suggest that agriculture was a milestone for the worse as well as for the better.
Agriculture brought great increases in the amount of food we were able to store. This meant that more people could survive. But agriculture also brought disease, inequality between the sexes and between social classes, and the tyranny of powerful rulers. Among human cultural hallmarks, agriculture is a mixed blessing. it is a halfway point between our noble traits, such as language and art, and our vices, such as drug abuse, genocide, and environmental destructiveness.
A Very Recent Development
Compared with other human hallmarks such as language and art, agriculture is especially recent. it began to appear only about ten thousand years ago. Our early steps toward agriculture were not deliberate experiments toward a goal. Humans did not have a plan to domesticate plants and animals. instead, agriculture grew out of human behaviors and the way plants and animals changed as a result of those behaviors.
Animal domestication arose partly from people keeping captive wild animals as pets and partly from wild animals learning the benefits of staying near people. Wolves, for example, learned to follow human hunters to catch crippled animals that the humans had wounded. People, in turn, sometimes fed or adopted wolf pups. Over time, descendants of some wolves grew tamer and tamer, until they had evolved into domestic dogs. Domestic cats came into existence in a similar way. Once people began harvesting and storing grain, mice and rats learned to raid these food stores. Small wild cats in turn learned that human communities were good places to find mice and rats, and humans learned that cats were useful for getting rid of rodent pests.